Wednesday, May 24

Nothing changed yesterday.

I've seen a lot of claims that what happened yesterday in Manchester represents some sort of new low.

It doesn't.

Mark Steyn wrote this in 2004, after Beslan:

When your asymmetrical warfare strategy depends on gunning down schoolchildren, you're getting way more asymmetrical than you need to be. The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children.

But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here.

2 comments:

"To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here."

Quite right, it's not the issue because Daesh aren't looking for dialogue or understanding. Their ideology simply requires that everyone convert to their one religion or die. There is no reasoning with zealots who are prepared to kill themselves and the most innocent in the worst way possible, they are lost to humanity and unfortunately will not find out when they're dead that there is no heaven and more unfortunately, no hell, because if there were, that is where they would find themselves.

The issue here is belief because no unbeliever could ever commit such atrocities, only those who believe in some higher power and a heaven could contemplate such gratuitous, despicable acts of murder.

Three things have struck me in all the reporting of the manchester and london bombs. The first is that the media need to stop reporting every detail, as this simply provides ideas and a manual for refining the next attack (do we need to know, for example, that the london attackers used ceramic knives strapped to their wrists, and had bottles of lighter fluid in the back of their van, or tried to hire a truck rather than a van?). The second is that your advice about confronting these cowards is absolutely sound. Several people did exactly that, thankfully, and it's clear they saved hundreds of injuries and deaths that would have arisen from the attackers reaching groups of people caught at bottlenecks in their escape routes. A clear field for the police is unlikely to be achieved quickly, whereas delaying the attackers helps the police find them. The last is that the refusal of imams to say the burial prayers for these twats is very encouraging, and a formal policy of burying them as unbelievers might genuinely help undermine the attraction of martyrdom, as well as offering some highly visible evidence that most muslims genuinely don't support them.